Experiment
by Janos
Summary: Mostly comedy with a darker side near the end... experiment gone wrong


New Comedy Fic  
  
"What was it you wanted to show us, Mr.Harper?" asked Dylan. The crew was gathered into the machine shop, expectantly waiting for the new invention of Harper's to be revealed.  
  
"Just take a look at this," he said and swept a sheet covering the invention onto the floor. It was big and made of metal and wires, just like all his other inventions, as far as they could see.  
  
"Wow!... What is it?" asked Beka.  
  
Harper sighed in exasperation, "It's something I call a de-dotage machine. What it's supposed to do is slow down the aging process so that it allows us to live longer,"  
  
They were silent.  
  
"Harper, are you sure that's wise? Going against the balance of nature is... not so wise," Trance pointed out.  
  
"You think I would be that stupid? Of course the effects can be reversed, if necessary,"  
  
They sighed with relief, glad that their engineer wasn't losing his brains.  
  
"Only problem is, I haven't found anything to test it on,"  
  
"You're not suggesting testing it on us, are you?" scoffed Tyr  
  
"No, but I was just looking for possible volunteers... it would be a useful thing, you have to admit,"  
  
"Harper, I won't have you doing experiments on us," Dylan said.  
  
Trance cut in, "I have a plant we can use. I've been trying to find a way for it to stop from dying so quickly, so this might actually help," she ran to get it.  
  
When she returned, she was holding a green and blue-leafed plant. She placed it on the floor in front of the machine, and the crew backed to the walls of the machine shop, as far away from the area as possible.  
  
When all was ready, Harper readied himself to turn on the machine.  
  
"Here goes. One... two... three!"  
  
There was a bright flash of white light and the crew was gone. Harpers eyes widened at what he saw in their place. Rommie walked over to him, it seemed she was the only one who had not been turned into a baby, like the others he saw sitting on the floor. Not to mention what had happened to the plant, which was now just a large purple seed sitting on the floor just where Trance had left it.  
  
"Wha-- what happened to them?" he gasped. Rommie put a hand on his shoulder, "It seems that there was a power surge in my systems just as you turned on the machine. That may have caused an increase in the effects. You can turn them back, can't you?"  
  
"Yeah, of course I can," he looked relieved but slightly sick at what they might say to him when they were brought back. There was a whirr and a click when he tried to turn it back on, but nothing more than that. He tried again. This time there was nothing.  
  
"I don't believe it! The power surge must have broken it,"  
  
"How soon can you fix it?"  
  
He looked in at the lightly smoking wires, and something sparked, sending him reeling back. It burst into flames. By the time they had gotten the fire put out, it was reduced to ashes.  
  
"It'll take me at least four, maybe five days to build a new one," he said, dejectedly looking again at the trouble his masterpiece had caused.  
  
Just then, the baby with blue skin and a tail, that Harper took to be Trance, started to cry because the one with brown skin and bone-blades, undoubtedly Tyr, was pulling on her tail. The other big one, most likely Dylan, crawled over and whacked Tyr on the head. This made Tyr let go of Trance's tail, but then he started to cry. Then the last one, which must have been Beka, started to cry too because everyone else was crying. This happened in only a few seconds, and it made a terrible din.  
  
Harper was terrified. "What do we do?" he asked, his eyes wide.  
  
"Take care of them until you can build a new machine, I suppose," she walked over and picked up Trance and Tyr, one in each arm. She rocked them and eyed Harper, telling him to do the same with Dylan and Beka. He edged his way over and struggled to pick up first one, then the other.  
  
"They're so small, how'd they get to be this heavy??" he panted. Just then Dylan spit up on his shirt. Harper looked ready to cry too.  
  
Rommie sighed. "Come on, we should turn one of the old crew quarters into some kind of nursery," she walked out the door.  
  
Trying and failing to ignore the spit-up on his favourite shirt, Harper followed her out. When he got to the room, Rommie had placed Tyr and Trance on the bed and was getting out anything that might prove useful for taking care of four babies. With difficulty, Harper laid his burden down on the bed as well. They had stopped crying, for now, and so Harper went to change his shirt. He threw the old one into the laundry shoot to be cleaned by the bots, and fetched out an older one from the drawer. Something told him it wouldn't be wise to wear a good one.  
  
When he got back to the nursery, Rommie had found some diapers, goodness knows where, and some baby bottles full of milk.  
  
"I've changed all of their diapers," Rommie said to him when he walked in. The babies were sleeping peacefully on the bed, sucking contentedly on the bottles and dreaming sweet baby dreams. Harper thought they looked rather cute, when they weren't destroying his eardrums.  
  
"Harper, hadn't you better go and build that machine so we can turn them back?"  
  
"Oh, right," he left Rommie to tend them and went back to the machine shop.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
By the end of the day, he had managed to build a new frame for the machine part of it to sit inside, and a way for the beam to be directed. He would have no more of this random shooting the whole room business.  
  
All the time he had been working, there were the muffled cries of the petite crew and the sounds of Rommie playing games with them. Right now, he was extremely glad he was not Rommie.  
  
He stood up and stretched his aching back, finished work for the day. He headed over to the mess hall to grab a Sparky, and then turned back towards the nursery.  
  
She turned around as he came in, and put a finger to her lips. He quietly turned and went out, when he saw the babies behind her on the bed, asleep. She came out into the hall with him, closing the door carefully behind her.  
  
"Let's leave them asleep for a bit. They've been going hard all day, so they should be asleep for a while. Andromeda will alert us if anything happens," she whispered.  
  
"OK," he whispered back, "I'm just going to go to my quarters, so if you need me..."  
  
She nodded and they parted.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
The night passed without incident.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
In the morning, Harper was woken by crashing and banging. Alarmed, he got up, after glancing at his watch. It was 4:00am. He groaned, but went out into the hall to see what was the matter, his hand resting on his holster. The sight that greeted him was not a pretty one. There was bright splashes of random colour on the wall, of paint and scribbles of crayon. Suddenly a few blurs whizzed past him. Rommie came panting up from the same direction, and looked relieved when she saw that Harper was up.  
  
"They've grown," she said.  
  
"What??"  
  
"I don't know how, it must be something to do with that machine again, but they now appear to be between the ages of two and three years old,"  
  
More crashing came from down the hallway out of sight, and Rommie ran off to see what they had done now.  
  
Harper followed her and saw that the dwarf crew, who had so recently been no more than infants, had indeed grown overnight. Trance was now a more purply colour than before, and Dylan, Beka, and Tyr looked like miniature versions of themselves, a little more pudgy with baby fat than normal, and Tyr and Dylan had no facial hair. Tyr's hair was not in its regular long braids, it was all frizzy and sticking out in all directions. Beka had turned her hair pink, lime green, and orange, a striking combination to look at. Dylan was trying vainly to get Tyr and Beka's attention. He was yelling at the top of his lungs, "I wanna play tag!! I wanna play tag!!!" over and over, more and more insistently the more they ignored him. And how the managed to ignore that noise was beyond the concepts of the human mind, but ignore him they did. They seemed perfectly happy drawing on the wall with a vengeance.  
  
Somehow Rommie managed to get their attention for a moment, in which time she suggested they play at making crafts. They were entirely enthusiastic about this idea, and followed her off to some room-or-other, leaving Harper to build the machine to change them back. He could see that the sooner he got it finished the better.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Harper had been working for some time, when all of a sudden there came an appalling racket outside the door. The tikes came in brandishing popsicle stick and glue contraptions, trying to show them off to him. There came innumerable cries of, "Lookit' what I made!" and "Watch me! Watch me!," and "No, me!" and "This is a slipfighter, see? There's the wings..." and so on until he began to develop a headache. Rommie rushed in to save him just when he thought all was lost. She tried to quiet them down, and said to Harper, "Sorry about this, I had to think of some way to keep them occupied. It's alright if they stay here for about ten minutes while I recoup a little?" he nodded, because he was sure his voice wouldn't project over the noise anyway. She lightly touched his shoulder in thanks for understanding, before she left. This movement did not go unnoticed amongst the kids. Beka started the chant, and the others soon joined in, "Harper and Rommie, sittin' in a tree! Kay-eye-ess-ess-eye-enn-jee! First comes love, then comes marriage, then come Harper with a baby carriage!" and they ran off around the machine shop giggling.  
  
"What's this?" asked Trance, picking up a nano-welder from the workbench. Harper bounded over and grabbed it from her hands before she had a chance to turn it on.  
  
"That's a tool. It's not for playing with, it's very dangerous,"  
  
Trance nodded her head hard, showing that she understood, no touching the tools.  
  
The others weren't so easy to persuade, however. Tyr refused to let go of his electric screw-driver once he found it, and Dylan was having a ball with the metal detector. The high-pitched noise that came from it was apparently extremely amusing. Beka had found her own amusement in turning his flashlight on and off until the beam died down, and while Harper's back was turned trying to get the screw-driver from Tyr, Trance had found a new source of pleasure. A pile of red, yellow, green, and white wires could be twisted into a number of interesting shapes, and she made herself a necklace of them. The way she was jumping around the shop made him afraid she would choke herself, but just then he had to deal with Beka who had hit Dylan over the head with her flashlight. She was trying to take his beloved metal detector from him, and he was putting up a good fight, "I WANT IT!" she cried.  
  
"ROMMIE!!" Harper called desperately. She rushed in a few seconds later. Seeing the turmoil, she immediately proceeded in relieving Beka, Tyr, Dylan, and Trance of their "toys". They protested, "No, I want it!" but it was all in vain. Rommie was much stronger than them in their Lilliputian state, and she easily overpowered them.  
  
"Finish that machine, quick," she called to him as she led the group out of the door.  
  
The quiet in the machine shop was blissful. He felt as though he had gone deaf, but didn't mind in the least. He bent down once again to work on his machine.  
  
"Ugh," he came up again, with the sticky, gluey craft that one of them had stuck into the device.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
The next morning Harper awoke to the sound of loud, throbbing music, which didn't help his headache any. He staggered out of bed and threw on some clothes. He contacted Rommie on the commlink.  
  
"Rommie, how old are they now?"  
  
"Unfortunately, they have all reached adolescence. I think you may have better chances of controlling them than I have been having. Could you please head over to the mess hall and try to talk to them?"  
  
"OK, Rommie," Harper wasn't exactly happy to be doing this, but he assumed that the music playing was theirs, and he had to get them to turn it down.  
  
He arrived in the mess hall, and heard that the music was definitely coming from in there. He opened the door, and the music intensified. The four members of the crew were sitting around listening to it, and doing nothing, as far as Harper could see. He entered the room and they didn't seem to notice him.  
  
"Err... hi," he said. They still didn't look at him, most probably they couldn't hear him with the music on. He went over and turned it off. This got their attention.  
  
"What did you do that for, I was listening to that!" complained Beka.  
  
"We'll turn it back on later, I just need to talk to you guys for a second,"  
  
"Guys and girls," corrected Trance, now the same purple as she was when Harper first met her.  
  
"That's right. Guys and girls. Well, ya see, there's this problem. You aren't really supposed to be the age you are now, just that I built this machine and it accidentally turned you all into... younger selves. But while I work on rebuilding it so I can change you all back, I need you to be quiet, so I can concentrate. Understand?"  
  
Tyr rolled his eyes "Yeah, sure." In his current state he was still taller than Harper.  
  
"You can't tell us what to do," said Dylan, "we're old enough to make our own decisions." The others agreed.  
  
"Yeah, I know you are, but I just need you to decide to turn your music down," he tried to persuade them, "besides, it'll ruin your hearing, up that loud," Harper himself had often listened to his music turned up that loud or louder, but being older than the others, something made him feel more and more like the parent. Now it seemed it was his responsibility to get them in bed before eleven, tell them not to ruin their ears, eyes, and whatever else, to put on a sweater, eat their greens, and to do their homework. The thought was a little unnerving.  
  
"Nobody understands me," declared Trance suddenly. Harper had no idea what he was supposed to say in response to this, but it appeared he didn't have to. The others were completely fine talking about this subject, so Harper left them to it. As he left, he heard some things such as "Adults think they own me," and "I'm old enough to take care of myself," and "We should be allowed to do anything we want and not get in trouble for it." This last one seemed a little bit ominous to Harper, as he imagined what sort of things they had in mind. But he didn't let it bother him and went work on the machine. It should take him about three more days at the very most, if nothing went wrong. He called Rommie on his commlink and told her what the crew was up to, and that he was going back to work on the machine. Just then, the crew turned their music on again, and they had to stop talking.  
  
Harper got to work.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
The next morning, the crew had grown much more than expected. They had bypassed their real age, and moved right on into old age.  
  
"Harper," Rommie told him, "you need to get that machine finished very soon. If they go any further, they could die. They have been growing at increasing rates each day, I have noticed. If I have predicted their movements correctly, and there is a 99.9% chance that I have, they should be as old as 120 by tomorrow,"  
  
This was very bad news. The machine wouldn't be finished for another day at the very least, but Harper was determined to try.  
  
Just after he received this news, the sixty-something crew came around the corner. They had wrinkles and greying hair, and as they tottered towards him, Harper felt extreme guilt. He couldn't bear to see them like this, and think of what they might look like tomorrow, so he ran off to the machine shop to finish the de-dotage machine as quickly as he could. He'd work well into the night if he had to.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
By the evening it seemed as though all was lost. Harper was almost ready to give up, when a very old and green-coloured Trance came in to see him.  
  
"You'll make it," she said in a croaking but soft voice.  
  
"It sure doesn't seem that way," he replied. There was a lump in his throat, and it was hard to say anything.  
  
"Don't be silly. You've always come through before,"  
  
"Yeah, I guess so. But, um, Trance...?"  
  
"Yes?"  
  
"If I don't make it, and you... well, if I don't make it, will you tell me about your people before you go?"  
  
She looked him in the eye. "You'll make it," she said, and she made her way out of the machine shop again.  
  
Harper gritted his teeth and continued building.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Several hours later, Rommie contacted Harper on his commlink. "Harper, I've been analysing the properties of your machine, and I have some bad news." Harper hung his head. More bad news. "What is it?" he asked. "In about three hours it will be impossible to reverse the effects. You must complete the machine before midnight tonight so we can turn them back before that happens. I'm sorry," the commlink closed. Harper was tired. He had been working almost non-stop all day, and the only way for him to get the machine finished in time was if he pushed himself beyond his limit. But he knew he would never be able to live with it if he didn't make it, so there was only one thing for it. "Rommie," he called on his commlink, "bring me a Sparky, would you?"  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
Trance came back into the machine shop two hours later, looking even older than before. She was holding a fresh supply of Sparky's for Harper, and as she set them on the workbench, she accidentally knocked a piece of equipment off. "Oh, I'm sorry," she started bending down to pick it up. Her old bones creaked, and Harper went to do it for her. He held up the oblong gadget, and a light dawned on his face. He turned to show Trance just what she had knocked off, but she was gone. He returned to the machine and installed the piece of equipment. After a bit of adjustment, and a final check, it was finally finished. He called Rommie and the others to tell them the good news.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~  
  
The light died down. Harper was relieved to see his four crew mates the right size again when he peeked out from behind the machine. He went over to them and first he gave Trance a big hug. "Thanks, Trance," he said. She smiled. This happiness didn't last for long, however. Tyr stepped out and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, lifting him off the ground. "There will be no more experiments performed on my person, understood?" he shouted. "Hey Tyr, I'm sure Rommie wouldn't mind changing your diaper one more time," Harper said, and Tyr dropped him on the floor and stalked out. Beka helped him up but just as soon pushed him down again. "What were you thinking??" she demanded, "We could have all been killed!" "What, you mean I don't get a, 'Hey Harper, thanks so much for depriving yourself of sleep so we didn't get so old that we shrivelled up into dust,'?" She sighed and helped him up again, "Maybe tomorrow when I'm not feeling so... old," she said, and followed Tyr out. Now it was Dylan's turn to reprimand him. "As much as I'm grateful, Harper, I can't have you making any machines as dangerous as that without my permission. Go destroy it right now, that's an order," "You don't need to tell me twice," he said and went back to the machine. He ripped out a few wires and broke the oblong piece of equipment. They all sighed with relief, it was finally over. "Now if you don't mind, I'm going to go get some sleep," said Harper and he went out and to his quarters. "Good idea," said Dylan after him.  
  
~~~~~~~~~~  
  
FIN 


End file.
